Women, feminism, and geek culture

Fish Are Friends, Not Linkspam (21 October 2014)

The Routine Harassment of Women in Male Dominated Spaces | Secret Gamer Girl (October 16): “Really though, all of this is really just part of a much bigger, much older problem that for some reason people just don’t ever seem to be willing to talk about. On some subconscious level, in aggregate, people on the internet are just constantly looking for an excuse to attack women. Especially, for whatever reason, women with any sort of involvement in games.”

On Gamergate: a letter from the editor | Polygon (October 17): “Video games are capital “C” Culture now. There won’t be less attention, only more. There won’t be less scrutiny. There certainly won’t be less diversity, in the fiction of games themselves or in the demographics of their players. What we’re in control of is how we respond to that expansion, as journalists, as developers, as consumers. Step one has to be a complete rejection of the tools of harassment and fear — we can’t even begin to talk about the interesting stuff while people are literally scared for their lives. There can be no dialogue with a leaderless organization that both condemns and condones this behavior, depending on who’s using the hashtag.”

Gamergate in Posterity | The Awl (October 15): “Maybe there will be some small measure of accountability in the far future, not just for public figures and writers and activists, but for all the people who could not or would not see their “trolling” for what it really was. Maybe, when their kids ask them what they were like when they were young, they will have no choice but to say: I was a piece of shit. I was part of a movement. I marched, in my sad way, against progress. Don’t take my word for it. You can Google it!”

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